FARMER FOCUS: Coming face to face with ‘superwheat’

The meeting season has been in full swing and I was lucky enough to attend an NFU event to get farmers and researchers talking about biotechnology.
The annual worldwide spend on biotech R&D overtook the amount spent on agrochemicals back in 2010 and there are a host of new technologies coming through that could quickly improve the genetic potential of our crops. But it is not clear, even to the regulatory bodies, whether they should be termed GM or not.
At the NFU meeting and also at the NIAB TAG Innovation Farm, I heard about and saw the breeding of the new “superwheat”, a simplistic but more consumer-friendly name than “synthetic hexaploid”. It was amazing to feel an incredibly hard and massive ear of this wheat that will be crossed into modern varieties. The idea is to increase diversity in our wheat by using traits from one of the original wheat parents, wild goat grass.
We’ve seen the dangers of limited diversity, for example in the Irish potato famine when one variety of one crop was grown, and it fits in with something a French agronomist said at a recent talk when referring to weeds and rotations – that nature will bring diversity to fields if we refuse to. Well, nature or the EU, anyway.
Another source of diversity is a bank of more than a thousand wheat varieties collected from around the world in the 1920s and 1930s by a botanist called Watkins who asked diplomats to post seeds home. Oh, for such foresight – I have enough trouble planning Christmas presents.
Which brings me to one of my surprisingly best trips – my annual visit to a large department store. I was lucky enough to overhear an exchange between a young shop assistant and a mature lady shopper. “Might I be able to find some eye pads somewhere?” she enquired. “iPads, yes madam, in the electrical department.” “Oh, I don’t want electric ones!” “I’m afraid they’re all electric madam. They’re over there with the other tablets.” “Tablets? No, no, I want pads!”
I shouldn’t have really, but I suddenly had a need for fork handles.
Andy Barr farms 630ha on a mixed family farm in mid-Kent, including 430ha mainly of winter wheat, oilseed rape and spring barley. The rest is taken up by an OELS scheme and grazing for 500 Romney ewes and 40 Sussex cattle